If you have followed Indian politics over the last two years, you know it well: New Delhi's monsoon season. Opposition benches, led by Congress president and Leader of Opposition Mallikarjun Kharge, boycotted the Rajya Sabha proceedings on Wednesday, demanding the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan in the wake of the NEET-UG paper leak controversy, which was the third consecutive day of adjournment. The Upper House met and broke, met and broke, until, on July 23, at 11 a.m., it was driven to action without any business being done other than laying routine papers on the table. The Lok Sabha was not faring much better as it was repeatedly adjourned in the afternoon.

The difference in this round is that the event that caused it is large. This year, the original NEET-UG test, which was to be conducted in early May, was cancelled all together due to allegations of a leak, and the re-conducted test was delayed till late June. A full-scale cancellation and re-run is not a mere administrative glitch for a system that handles a yearly intake of 22 lakh applications, it affects the counselling schedules of medical colleges across the country and reignites all the old controversies about the one exam being used to decide the fate of 22 lakh youngsters in one go. The stand that Kharge took on the floor was clear: "As long as Pradhan is in office, there is no scope for discussion, of any kind. Congress MP K.C. Venugopal reiterated the same argument, making a connection between the paper leak incident and the “heavy-handed” police action against protestors at Jantar Mantar in Delhi. Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav, who attended the black-clothes protest along with Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra outside Parliament, did not indulge in any partisan jibba-jabba but in the same unfortunate manner, kept repeating "the future of the country's youth" while the other side does the same.

The government has responded in a non-threatening way, in terms of action, rather than in a confrontational one. Parliamentary Affairs Minister Kiren Rijiju has reiterated for three days now that the Centre is ready to debate but wishes to first finalise the format and duration of the debate after consultation with the leaders of each party on the floor. What this means is that it is a fairly standard bureaucratic delaying game which opposition members read as a stalling tactic. Leader of the House JP Nadda was more harsh, saying the opposition was "disrespecting the chamber" by continuing to shout slogans but "not discussing issues in depth". In the middle, Deputy Chairman Harivansh Narayan Singh tried to invoke procedural discipline by pointing out that Rule 267, which allows suspension of the listed business for an urgent discussion, is meant for the rarest of rare circumstances, which was directly disputed by the DMK MP Tiruchi Siva that a scandal involving lakhs of aspiring doctors is exactly such a situation.

Take the “theatre” out of the “theatre” and there is a real economic picture lurking beneath this “theatre” that is not often spoken about within the chamber. The coaching and test-preparation sector, which is largely dependent on exams such as NEET and JEE, is estimated to be worth about fifty thousand crores of rupees in India in 2024, with projections of it soon surpassing one and a half lakh crore by the end of every decade, regardless of the government in power. The small town of Kota in Rajasthan, which operates on this economy, actually shrank during the chaos, as industry experts say that student enrollments fell from around two to two-and-a-half lakh to less than one lakh due to mental health issues, a ban on very young students taking admission and a surge in the availability of cheaper online options. Individually, coaching bodies have since petitioned the finance ministry before the Union Budget, saying that they were providing what was once an optional course for test preparation a compulsion for anyone who wants to get into medical and engineering colleges, and thus cannot consider it a luxury service.

That is a kind of economic context that the people who study India's testing infrastructure more than the politics of it, are interested in because it suggests the deeper argument which is now swirling in the heads of those who do study India's testing infrastructure: the issue was never security breaches at a few exam centres, it was architectural. Huge incentive to cheat the system and huge consequence if they do succeed, as a single high stakes exam window, offline on one date, for more than twenty million candidates. The other option being pushed in discussions is to open several testing windows, make the exams computer-based and require digital proctoring with greater oversight and synchronization, and stagger the testing dates like it's done for graduate admissions testing in several other countries, so as to mitigate the impact of any single leak and provide students more than one chance for a good result. But whether or not that structural rethink will last beyond this week's headlines, or just be put on the shelf until the House returns to its normal business, is really the question to watch as the slogans in the well finally fade away.